Mobile Games

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Mobile Games
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References

• S. Matyas, C. Matyas, C. Schlieder, P. Kiefer, H.
  Mitarai, and M. Kamata. Designing Location-based
  Mobile Games With A Purpose Collecting
  Geospatial Data with CityExplorer. In ACM ACE,
  2008.
• L. Grant, H. Daanen, S. Benford, A. Hampshire, A.
  Drozd, and C. Greenhalgh. MobiMissions the game
  of missions for mobile phones. In ACM SIGGRAPH,
  2007.

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Designing Location-based Mobile Games with a
Purpose Collecting Geospatial Data with
CityExplorer

• S. Matyas, C. Matyas, C. Schlieder, P. Kiefer, H.
  Mitarai, and M. Kamata.
• ACM Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
  (ACE) 2008

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Motivation

• Design location-based mobile games with a purpose
• Targets
• entertainment
• quantity
• quality

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CityExplorer

• An occupying game
• Players choose several kinds of real world
  objects
• At the end of game, who holds the majority of
  game tokens in each region occupy the region and
  gets points

Choose location
Occupy Objects
Validate
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Collected Data

• The photo of the location
• The name of the location
• The correct location category
• GPS

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Quality Control

• They implement a community-driven review process
  for CityExplorer
• A player can either approve or refuse a marker of
  another player

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Use Case Studies

• Three games were played in Bamberg (Germany)

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Use Case Studies

• One game was played in Fujisawa (Japan) and
  Bamberg (Germany)

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Results (1/3)

• The 14 players in Bamberg collected a total of
  772 markers over a period of 20 days.
• General location categories resulted in more
  collected markers than specific categories.
• Fun ratings
• mean 4.4 with a standard deviation of 0.5

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Results (2/3)

• The 8 players in the multi-city game collected in
  total 106 markers in the four days.
• Fun ratings
• mobile part mean 3.6 with a standard deviation
  of 0.6
• online part mean 2.9 with a standard deviation
  of 0.9

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Results (3/3)

• 388 markers (42) were at least corrected a
  single time, but 539 markers (58) remained
  undecided.
• 345 markers (37) were approved to be correct
• 38 markers (0.04) got refused.

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Conclusions

• Designers should leave the game area as open as
  possible.
• An in-game reviewing and correction step - a
  community based data quality control - is needed.
• Players can be motivated to provide rich
  geospatial data sets through a location-based
  mobile game with a purpose.

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MobiMissions The Game of Missions For Mobile
Phones

• L. Grant, H. Daanen, S. Benford, A. Hampshire, A.
  Drozd, and C. Greenhalgh.
• ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 educators program

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Cellular Technology
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MobiMissions (1/2)

• Creating missions
• a series of photographs
• sections of text
• cell-IDs
• Searching for missions
• missions created by players
• floating missions

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MobiMissions (2/2)

• Completing missions and uploading responses
• rate how good the mission was
• Rating missions and responses on the website
• rate other players' missions and responses on the
  website
• Scoring

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Experiment

• Five weeks in October and November 2006
• A group of 11 volunteers aged between 16 and 18
  years

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Overview of Game Use

• 123 responses and 73 missions
• only 31 (42) were responded to by anyone other
  than the author of the mission

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Findings (1/3)

• Local co-located play
• players preferred playing with others
• Asynchronous social play
• most players felt little social obligation to
  reciprocate to missions because they did not know
  who they were responding to
• The content and value of missions
• majority of players felt it was more important to
  create interesting missions
• however, creating interesting missions was
  difficult and required significant time and effort

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Findings (2/3)

• The locations of play

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Findings (3/3)

• The role of the website
• players expected more synchronous, immediate
  communication in extended social conversations
• Competitive game or social exchange?
• for most players, the points reward was thus
  extrinsic to the emergent game goal of creating
  interesting missions, meaning that the points
  were not a motivating feature

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Future Possibilities

• Site-specific applications
• School
• Located social networks
• Shared interest groups
• Games